The Associated Press
MEXICO CITY- The federal attorney general’s office said Wednesday it has opened a criminal investigation into the escape of a fugitive rural police chief who is suspected of helping kill six people in southern Mexico.
Anicacio Perez, police chief of Huimanguillo in Tabasco state, is wanted on suspicion of organized crime and involvement in the killing of six people in January - a crime local police said could be linked to drug trafficking.
The office’s news release was its first public confirmation that agents were seeking Perez, though the attempted arrest had been witnessed by a crowd in Huimanguillo, a town about 600 kilometers (350 miles) southeast of Mexico City that is governed by the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party.
It did not specify the target of the new investigation. But it said that when federal agents tried to arrest Perez at a rodeo on Sept. 7, Mayor Walter Herrera ordered local police to protect him “at the same time as he incited the people who accompanied him to lynch” the federal agents, the attorney general’s office said.
As a result, Perez escaped, the attorney general’s office said.
A local newspaper, El Heraldo de Tabasco, reported that after the after the incident, Herrera said that Perez had taken a vacation to resolve some family matters.
Chiapas state officials want to prosecute Perez for the January attack in which more than a dozen gunmen bearing assault rifles tracked down and killed a former mayoral candidate and five other people.
The gunmen kidnapped a servant from the house of Felipe Espinosa in Ostuacan, near the line between Chiapas and Tabasco states and forced him to lead them to the victims.
The killed included Espinosa, his father, a brother, a cattle farmer and two other people.